Jack looked into his friend’s fervid eyes, already showing a fine glister of drink. “Right, Jackie? Right?”
“Uh, sure.” He had no idea what Jule was talking about. “You hungry, Julie? There’s some bread—”
“Nah. Maybe in a little bit. Got to wake up first—”
He returned to the cabinet and poured more Irish Mist into his mug. Jack watched, suddenly undone by his own sorrow, and anger, the smell of Irish whiskey. “Look,” he said. “Julie, I feel pretty lousy. I’m going to try and lie down again for a while, see if I can sleep. You’re going to be here all day, right?”
Jule stared thoughtfully out the window. “I think so. Maybe tonight, too, if that’s okay with you all. Unless the Allied Commander’s changed her mind.”
“Okay. So in an hour or two, okay, I’ll be back down—”
Jule turned to him, eyes far too bright. “Sure, Jackie, sure. We’ll talk, later.”
He slept, though badly. Dreams of Leonard, Jack’s formerly derailed system of arousal now, oddly, back in place. Lowering his head between Leonard’s thighs, his hands parting Leonard’s muscular legs, taking Leonard’s cock in his mouth. Then Jack himself coming, the first time in ages like that, from a dream: arcing himself awake, hand between his own legs, groaning.
“Ah, fuck.” Orgasm blindsided into a skull-jarring headache; he fumbled at his nightstand until he found the precautionary water glass he’d set there earlier. Leonard, why am I dreaming about LEONARD?
The real question, of course, was Why haven’t I ever stopped dreaming about Leonard? Something he should have taken up with his therapist, back when New York had therapists instead of soothsayers on the stock exchange.
He lay there for a while trying to will away his headache, a dreadful underlying tiredness that, he was beginning to sense, had too little to do with too much Jack Daniel’s. After fifteen minutes he sat up, painfully, and pulled open the drawer of his nightstand. Took out the vial of Fusax, placed a half dropperful beneath his tongue. He had just replaced the bottle when there was a knock at his door.
“Jack? It’s Emma. May I come in?”
“Sure,” he croaked, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He smiled gamely as she entered, wearing a faded denim jumper and cotton blouse, her tousled curls held back by a child’s flowered headband, and carrying a big canvas bag.
“Feeling a little better? You shouldn’t try to keep up with Jule, you know—”
“I wasn’t, I wasn’t—”
“You should leave that to the professionals. When was the last time you saw a doctor, Jackie?”
He thought back: the hospital, early spring. “A month,” he lied. “Maybe two.”
“Where? Those assholes at Saint Joseph’s?”
He stared at the floor, mumbled something about another clinic.
Emma looked unimpressed. “What are your numbers these days? When was the last time you got them?”
“I don’t know, Emma. I mean, I don’t remember.”
“When you were in the hospital they were pretty lousy, Jackie.” She sighed, sitting beside him on the bed with the canvas bag at her feet: “I’m not going to fuck with you, Jack. Right now, to me, you look pretty bad.”
“I’m just thin, Emma. I don’t feel—”
“Even before last night: you just don’t look healthy to me. So. I want to check you out. Okay?”
She pulled on latex gloves, took his temperature, blood pressure, pulse. Felt his joints and examined him for lesions, scabs that hadn’t healed, damp spots in the crook of knee or elbow. Stethoscope to his chest and back, first warming it with her gloved hand, then checking for the telltale sough of fluid in his lungs. Jack sat through it all with troubled patience: something medieval in this, or Victorian: doctor armed with ear trumpet and little else, certainly nothing that could shout above the din of invisibles swarming, replicating inside him. I don’t think there’s anything in that black bag for me.
Away with the stethoscope, out with the ophthalmoscope to peer into his eyes, then change the instrument’s black avian head to examine ears and throat and nostrils.
“Huh.” Emma drew back from him, frowning.
“What?” demanded Jack.
Off with the laryngoscope and back to the eyes again. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. She looked puzzled. “Have you had thrush?”
“No.” Spark of panic. “Do I now?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. But there’s something weird in there. Like a growth—”
“A growth? What kind of growth—”
“I don’t know. Here—” She slid a tongue depressor from a sterile packet, and something like a very long Q-Tip, what they used for throat cultures. “Say ‘Ah,’ I want to scrape some of it…”
He said, “Ah,” gagging. Growths. Fungus.
“Huh.” Emma’s eyes widened as she turned to hold first the wooden depressor and then the culture probe to the light. “This is very strange.”
“WHAT?”
“Well, look—there’s definitely something going on in there. See?” She held the tongue depressor so he could see what was on it, a thin film of something granular, faintly greenish—not a sickly mucousy green, but crystalline, like dyed salt. The same thing adhered to the Q-Tip.
“What is it?” he whispered.
Emma shook her head. “I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like it. Or heard of anything like it.” She stared at him. “It appears to be in your eyes, too, Jack. Are you having trouble seeing? Blurred vision, anything like that?”
“Uh, well—well, yes, maybe a little.” He gazed at the cultures in her hands. “Jesus, Emma, what is it? Is it a fungus?”
“No. It’s definitely not a fungus. Not thrush. A fungal infection doesn’t look like this. I don’t know what looks like this. And your temperature isn’t elevated, for whatever that’s worth, and there doesn’t seem to be anything in your lungs.
“Actually, you do seem sort of okay—I don’t see any lesions, or anything like that. But you have obviously lost quite a bit of weight, which isn’t so great. Any nausea?”
“Not really. Just—I don’t feel all that hungry. I feel kind of speedy, actually, most of the time. And my dreams are weird…”
He thought of the Fusax, inches from his elbow in the nightstand drawer.
“Huh.” She fixed him with an odd look. “Jule has weird dreams, too. Has he told you?”
“No.”
She bent beside her canvas bag, withdrew two plastic Ziploc bags. Deposited the cultures, one in each, then scribbled something on the labels. “I’m going to have these checked out. It’s very strange, these crystals—they almost look like uric acid does, when you get dehydrated.”
“What could it be?” Viruses from rain forests and newly exposed meteorites, mass amphibian die-outs and now a new disease, courtesy of Leonard Thrope.
“I don’t know. Did you ever see The Andromeda Strain?”
He started to laugh—horrified, almost delirious.
“I’m sorry!” She swept him into a hug, cradling his head with latex hands. “Oh God, Jack, I didn’t mean that—”
“It’s okay,” he gasped. “It’s okay—”
“It’s just so strange, you read all the time about these weird new things. But some of them are good, Jackie—you know? At least in theory, this could be good,” she added somewhat dubiously. “I’ll run it by the lab, have some other people look at it. Are you doing anything different? Some weird therapy?”